(7) Sun Aug 06 2006 23:22Keyboard Madness:
Sumana and I play a Tetris game where we use the same keyboard. It gave me an idea for the game that the most people could play using the same keyboard.

It's a spacewar type game with a separate spaceship for every key on the keyboard. When you press a key, that character shows up on the screen as a spaceship and joins the game. You control the spaceship with the corresponding key. Tapping the key rotates your ship clockwise, and holding it down accelerates.

The health of a spaceship is represented as a color from green to red. Accelerating drains your health, and so does colliding with another ship. You kill other spaceships by ramming them: this does some damage to you but more to the other ship. If your health goes to super-red your ship explodes.

In theory you can have as many players as there are keys on the keyboard, assuming they've all got long tentacles for fingers. In practice you will only have a few players, but each player can try to control multiple ships. Will you use ships as disposable missiles or try to set up pincer movements? Or just try to hit the other player's keys and mess up their navigation?